Quantified KM success story number 99

This quantified success story is from a community of practice within Halliburton, and is described by Rob Cross and partners as follows

99 by Steve Bowbrick on Flickr

Consider Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries. An industry leader in the knowledge management realm, Halliburton has regularly employed ONA in many of its efforts to systematically build 19 CoPs across a variety of business disciplines and technical services. 

Halliburton did not implement these communities in an ad hoc fashion: Senior management demanded more than loosely defined or difficult to measure objectives such as “improved collaboration” or “better knowledge sharing.” Rather, the community initiatives had to show measurable results directly linked to financial performance. By applying targeted interventions based on ONA assessments, Halliburton has been able to do just that across a number of internal and external communities.  

As an example, a global CoP within a critical business unit produced the following measurable results in one year:

• Lowered customer dissatisfaction by 24%
• Reduced cost of poor quality by 66%
• Increased new product revenue by 22%
• Improved operational productivity by more than 10%

Employees in this community design, manufacture, and install equipment enabling production of hydrocarbons from newly completed oil and gas wells. Although initial planning for the completion of a well is very important, the final design is highly dependent on the operational parameters of the well. This means that a completion may go through a large number of changes depending on how the drilling of the well develops, various reservoirs it may cross, expected production, and local logistics. 

Because of this dynamic environment, all those involved must collaborate closely to avoid errors in hand offs from one group to the next. Through its community investments, Halliburton created a global, collaborative environment that helped mobilize expertise to solve problems at an individual well and also benefited drilling around the world as others avoided costly mistakes. For example, at one point a member of the completions community experienced a specific problem with a deep-water well in West Africa. Through both virtual forums and specialist roles in the network, a solution to the problem was found and then propagated with such speed that three other similar completions to be performed within the next 24 hours avoided the same problem.